Strays Read Free

winked.  “I like your style.”  He finished the sweeping bow and pulled himself back up.  “So I want to show you something.”
    “Don’t want to see it.”
    “It ain’t that,” said the boy.  “Just my tats.  Want to see my tats?”
    He reached up to the locks of hair about his neck and parted them, revealing the printed body art that was intaglioed across his throat.  Sarah saw the letters—S and P—and there was an apostrophe, and then T’S and PL and then ET’S and PLA and then at last it was all revealed, inscribed across the neck and throat of the drunk boy with the fatty-black hair, his special billboard to the world:
    LET’S PLAY
    Sarah belched, and something that tasted like rotted milk came up in her throat, as if the scream took on solid form.  She staggered back, turning away from the boy.  When her eyes were averted, she forced the vomit back down.  It burned in her chest and it burned in her belly, for she had been without food for coming up on two days.
    The bathrooms were past a thin door next to the beer cooler, along a narrow hallway leading back to the stockroom.  She knew them well enough.  She had spent the better part of three nights in the fourth stall down, sleeping crouched on the toilet with knees tucked up into a fetal position until the night clerk came in to mop the floors around 3:00 a.m.  The regular clerk, the one who was out there now listening to the ballgame, knew she slept there.  So far he hadn’t said anything, seeming too interested in listening to baseball, even though 1986 had not been kind to the Mariners thus far.  Sarah thought that maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he was the last good person on the Sea-Tac Strip, but maybe, as she often suspected, he was just waiting for the opportunity to get something in return, to offer an invite with a slurry “let’s play.”
    That was her experience anyway.
    Sarah entered the bathroom, went to mirror, and checked herself.  Almost a week on her own, and she still hadn’t outgrown the vanity of it.  Still, the habits were slipping.  She ran fingers through her hair, fluffing the last remnants of curls that were fading from days without a good wash, and she checked the circles under her eyes.  They made her look old; no wonder the college boy didn’t know she was fifteen, a little less than three years from being “street legal.”  Still, she still looked good … well, good enough.  She was not yet ready to use this body of hers as a last resort, but the dull ache in her belly and the soft growls that accompanied it continued to linger.
    Satisfied with herself, or as satisfied as she was going to get, Sarah rubbed her face and yawned.  She tried to remember a time when the yawn was a harbinger of good things, of a restful sleep in a warm bed undisturbed by the groping touch of callused, sticky hands and the chortling breath that stank of Cortez Silver.
    Let’s play.
    Sarah jumped.   There were no such good memories.  For half a decade she had learned to sleep like a soldier, mind slipping barely three clicks into dream state so the senses could be on the alert for intruders.  Not that the alert had done any good.  Big Buddy was unwelcome but inevitable.  The only thing that soldier-sleep had done for Sarah is spared her the shock of a surprise attack when he came calling.  The nights with Big Buddy were terrible enough but ten times worse if you didn’t see him coming.
    A crusty laugh escaped from Sarah’s lungs, another precursor to the scream she fought to control, the way the belch had preceded the vomit.  Sarah had no idea what amused her.  Perhaps it was the fact that she looked forward to sleep, looked forward to crouching like a swami trying to fit into a box, because despite the pain of awakening with an almost geriatric pain in her knees and hips, at least for those few hours it was sleep undisturbed.  She was not sure why that amused her but it did, almost as much as the fact that